Burn, Baby, Burn

'The Wicker Tree’ is nowhere as bad as I expected it to be, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is any good. Robin Hardy’s somewhat belated follow up to the 1972 classic ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Tree’ is not a sequel so much as a rather arch attempt to recapture the spirit of the earlier film, but without the clever script, strong performances and genuine shock and surprise of its predecessor. What we’re left with is an uneven mix of horror and comedy, a kind of modular construction where key scenes from the earlier film are recreated – badly – as a foundation and vastly inferior elements are bolted onto the shaky framework. It falls over long before the end.

It’s not all bad, of course, but the worst is awful, and the good merely average. Christopher Lee’s utterly pointless cameo sort of sums up the whole misadventure – it serves no purpose and makes no narrative sense – it only works as a nod to the original, which, under normal circumstances would be okay but slightly indulgent - but here, when everything is a nod to the original, it just seems like a waste of forty years.